Field
The present disclosure relates to network management. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a method and system for facilitating automatic configuration of a multi-switch link aggregation for a respective client device.
Related Art
The exponential growth of the Internet has made it a popular delivery medium for heterogeneous data flows. Such heterogeneity has caused an increasing demand for bandwidth. As a result, equipment vendors race to build larger and faster switches with versatile capabilities, such as link aggregation (LAG), to move more traffic efficiently. However, the complexity of a switch cannot grow infinitely. It is limited by physical space, power consumption, and design complexity, to name a few factors. Furthermore, switches with higher and more versatile capability are usually more complex and expensive.
As more time-critical applications are being implemented in data communication networks, high-availability operation is becoming progressively more important as a value proposition for network architects. It is often desirable to aggregate links to multiple switches to operate as a single logical link (referred to as a multi-switch link aggregation) to facilitate load balancing among the multiple switches while providing redundancy to ensure that a device failure or link failure would not affect the data flow. The switches participating in a multi-switch link aggregation are referred to as partner switches.
A multi-switch link aggregation allows multiple links between a client device, which can be an end host or a switching device, and a plurality of partner switches. Currently, such a multi-switch link aggregation in a network has not been able to take advantage of the automatic configuration of the client device coupled to the partner switches. While coupling the client device, a network administrator typically configures the multi-switch link aggregation manually on a respective client device. In the current era of reduced operational expenditure, such manual configuration can lead to a substantial bottleneck.
While multi-switch link aggregation brings many desirable features to networks, some issues remain unsolved for client device configurations.